


Every Road Leads To Here

by RoseByAnyOtherName17



Series: 30 Day Writing Challenge (Derek/Stiles) [27]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 10:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7887199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseByAnyOtherName17/pseuds/RoseByAnyOtherName17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So he's not your cousin huh?" Danny was smirking as they watched Derek walk away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Road Leads To Here

Allison was the first person to ask him. “So what’s up with you and Derek?”

Stiles frowned. “I—what?”

“Well, when he was a fugitive—thanks to you and Scott—he chose your bedroom to hide out in, despite the fact that your dad is the sheriff,” she pointed out. “He continues to use you as his main source for research, even though he now has a gang of teenagers with computers to do all that for him, and you two spend at least half of your time in danger trying to save each other. So seriously, what is it with you two?”

Stiles opened and closed his mouth like a fish as he tried to think of something to say. “What?” he finally settled on, looking utterly lost.

“Come on, Stiles!” she pleaded, flopping to the ground with more grace than he would ever have. “I can’t even enjoy my own romantic life without hiding it from the entire town, the least you can do is let me in on yours!”

“Allison, I don’t have a romantic life,” Stiles insisted. “I’ve never even kissed anyone before. Also, there are so many things that are wrong with this entire conversation. Derek? What the hell?”

Allison scowled. “We’re supposed to be best friends.”

Stiles raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re my best friend’s secret girlfriend. Also, have you forgotten that I’m kind of a little bit in love with Lydia? Your best friend?”

Allison waved her hand dismissively from her place on the grass. “You’re not in love with her. Derek, on the other hand…”

“Scares the ever-loving crap out of me,” Stiles finished. “And we’re done with this conversation.” A text came in from Scott and he sighed. “Scott says he loves you and to look at the fountain.”

Allison sat up and immediately her face softened into a smile. Stiles used the distraction to gather his things and head to his next class.

 

It’s Danny next time, a few weeks later after lacrosse practice. “Hey, Stiles, isn’t that your cousin?” he asked. Stiles turned to look towards the parking lot and groaned inwardly. 

Jackson decided to walk past right then. “His cousin? Dude, that’s Derek Hale,” he said, shoulder-checking Stiles roughly on his way between them. “Like Stiles could be related to someone like him.”

Danny stared after him, eyebrows furrowed. “Wait…wasn’t he a fugitive a few months ago?”

“The charges were dropped,” Stiles said automatically. “Proven innocent. Look,” he continued before Danny could say anything else, “I’d better go see what he wants.” He jogged over to where Derek was leaning against his Jeep, looking like he’d been there for awhile. Stiles tried not to think about that so he didn’t have to decide if it was creepy or not.

“Erica thinks I should include you in training,” Derek said as soon as he was close enough to hear. “It couldn’t really hurt, because you’re human but you’re still…useful.” He said the word like it personally offended him to admit anything positive about Stiles.

Stiles blinked. “Uh…thanks?” 

Derek rolled his eyes. “So you and Scott need to come with Isaac after school tomorrow to the depot. I’ve got some ideas for you, and Deaton said he might come by and show you a few things with magic. He thinks you might have some potential there.”

He waited expectantly for an answer, and Stiles finally said, “Uh…okay.”

“See you then,” Derek said, and then he was just gone.

Danny came up next to Stiles, staring after Derek the same way he was. “So…not your cousin?”

“Sorry about that,” Stiles said, shaking his head. “It was kind of hard to explain why I had a fugitive hiding out in my house at the time.”

“Stiles, nothing is ever easy with you.” Danny was laughing though. “So you’re like a thing or something? Is that why you wanted to know if gay guys thought you were attractive?”

Stiles choked on air. “Dude, no!” he exclaimed when he got his breath back. Danny raised an eyebrow at him while he gathered himself together and opened the door to the Jeep. “It’s not like that. He doesn’t—we’re not even friends.”

“Right,” Danny said, smirking a little. “Later, Stiles.”

 

Training for Stiles turned out to be a lot of building stamina, rather than fighting technique. “The kanima—Jackson—will kill you before you can even try to fight back,” Derek told him upon arrival, while Scott joined the betas in the train car. “You need to be quick enough to get away, or at least to buy yourself some time until one of us can get to you or you can come up with another plan.”

Stiles nodded. “Alright, so…”

Derek suddenly lunged at him, and it was only because of reflexes that he’d picked up in lacrosse that Stiles managed to dodge without getting himself killed. He stumbled into a wall and took off in the other direction, towards the entrance. He could hear Derek behind him, faster than he was and not even wolfed out yet, and he reached into his pocket without thinking and flung his hand over his head, just before the door, and jumped. Something snagged on his shirt but a second later he was on the other side of the line of mountain ash, whirling around to watch Derek slam against the invisible barrier and fall back.

He could hear Scott and Erica cheering as Derek got back to his feet, watching Stiles from as close as he could get to the line without being thrown back again. Stiles expected some sort of reprimand, but Derek looked like he was about to smile, and from behind Stiles someone said, “That’s very impressive,” and then there was Deaton. “Have you been practicing, Stiles?”

“Uh, no,” Stiles admitted, still breathing hard from the fear of Derek coming at him like that. “I just, uh…I kind of panicked a little.”

“It’s good,” Deaton said. “We can work with this. Break the line now, if you will.” 

Stiles swept his hands to either side, and immediately flung himself sideways when Derek launched himself at him again. But Derek anticipated it, and they were suddenly on the ground with Derek pinning him down, face uncomfortably close to Stiles’ throat.

“Dead,” Derek said quietly, and pulled up enough to grin at Stiles.

“Asshole,” Stiles muttered, shoving at his chest until he got up and pulled Stiles up with him.

Deaton looked amused, but thankfully, he said nothing. “Right,” he said. “Let’s continue.”

 

It was months later that anyone made an insinuation about Derek and Stiles again, after Erica and Boyd ran and Derek found his sister. After the werewolves tried to kill themselves at the hotel, and the alpha pack came in and destroyed nearly everything that was left. After Boyd died at Derek’s forced hand. 

Stiles stayed for a long time, even after Derek demanded that everyone leave. Isaac led Miss Blake out, despite her protests, and Cora and Scott went to take Boyd’s body somewhere else. But Stiles remained, ankle-deep in water, until Derek reached up and grabbed his hand shakily where it rested on his shoulder, holding it so tightly that it hurt. Stiles let him, and they stayed that way until Cora came back inside quietly, eyes filled with quiet tears. 

“Thank you,” she whispered to Stiles, briefly resting her own hand on Stiles’ and Derek’s, before Derek stood up and shook his head. His hand slipped out of Stiles’ last as he stepped away. He looked like he might say something, but then he turned and headed up the spiral staircase. Stiles watched him leave, and then Cora walked him out of the loft.

“You’re part of his pack, you know,” Cora said softly, once they reached the Jeep. “You need to know that.”

Stiles climbed into the Jeep, rolling down the window when she tapped on it again. “I mean it,” she insisted, as if afraid that he didn’t believe her. “You’re just as much as Isaac is, as me. Maybe more than me. You’re there when he needs people there, I know it. Scott and Allison told me everything from before.”

Stiles nodded, then shrugged. “See you, Cora.” 

 

After the nogitsune, after Allison and Aidan dying (because of Stiles, he thought in private), he withdrew as much as he could, given the situation. He knew when he was dreaming now, knew all of the tricks, knew when he was awake, but he still expected to see Allison coming around the corner at school, or to call and say they should marathon Nicholas Sparks movies because even though she never admitted it, she missed Scott and spending time with Stiles seemed to help her. He couldn’t look at Scott and Lydia without feeling soul crushing guilt, even though they repeated over and over that it wasn’t his fault, that none of it was. He didn’t believe it.

But when Derek was kidnapped, he went to Mexico with them, and after everything that happened after, he said goodbye to Derek with the rest of them. Everyone was looking at Stiles instead of Derek as he drove away, but he didn’t return the looks. He didn’t care anymore what they thought.

Until he did. “I didn’t know that Derek means so much to you,” Malia said a few nights later, curled up around Stiles in his bed. Her thumb stroked up and down Stiles’, and for a moment he was grateful for how tactile she liked to be, until her words registered.

“He meant as much to me as everyone else,” he replied, not turning to look at her.

“You mean a lot to him too,” Malia said, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. He noticed her continued use of present tense. “I can tell, even if he doesn’t. Everyone does.”

Stiles shrugged and turned over onto his back to look at her. “Why does it matter?”

Malia smiled a little. “Because it’s different between you two,” she told him. “Me and you, it’s good, and probably could be for a long time, but you’re going to go do things that I won’t be able to join you in, and I know that. And you’ll never be completely happy with me.”

“I am happy,” Stiles said softly, touching her cheek. She leaned into it, but he knew she heard the lie.

“You will be,” she said. She nudged him back over again and curled up against his back. “I’ll stick around until you are,” she whispered, nudging the back of his neck with her nose. 

Stiles closed his eyes and held her hand in his until he fell asleep. 

 

He went to college fairly close to Beacon Hills; the whole pack did. He and Lydia were the furthest away, at Berkeley; Scott went to veterinary school in the next town over; Kira stayed in Beacon Hills to help Malia graduate, because after eight years of being a coyote, a year and a half wasn’t enough to catch her up completely. Stiles was studying mythology and training with the local pack’s emissary, after getting formal permission to reside temporarily in their territory. 

In their junior year, Stiles and Lydia got an apartment together off campus. They were both graduating early and then returning to Beacon Hills, even though they all knew Lydia could go wherever she wanted. “You guys are my family,” she said steadily, when Scott confronted her about it. “I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

They had been receiving letters in the mail from Derek and Cora every few months for the last few years, except now. Derek hadn’t written in over six months, and Stiles tried to put it out of his head. It was better for him to move on, he told himself. Holding onto Beacon Hills only ever hurt Derek in the end.

“You know he’s going to come back, right?” Malia said as she helped him pack up the apartment a few days before graduation from college. “That’s why he stopped writing all the time. He’s going to see you—okay, us—soon enough that it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Stiles didn’t respond. It was too much to hope for.

 

He was sitting by himself by a lake in the preserve, a few miles from the old Hale house. He was working at the library in town for awhile because the local community college wanted him to have some job experience under his belt before he began to teach a course there. He didn’t mind. It was nice, being surrounded by books all the time, and it was flexible enough that he could serve the pack just as well as he always had. Lydia was right, he had decided a long time ago. They were his family now.

He still wondered about Derek sometimes, even though he knew he should stop. How he was doing, where he was, if he and Cora had joined another pack or if they were on their own. If he was happy where he was. It had been nine months since the last letter, which had only vaguely mentioned something about Europe and, at the end, without a P.S., “I miss you.” Stiles still had the letter tucked into his bedside table drawer. He had all of them, every one since Derek left all those years ago. He liked to pull them out and read over them sometimes, tracing the handwriting with his finger and trying to imagine Derek writing it, maybe smiling, somewhere nice. 

The breeze picked up, sweeping a few of the falling leaves into the air to swirl out over the lake, and Stiles closed his eyes, ignoring the slight chill. Summer was fading away again, bringing with it a cold that wasn’t normal for California, but Stiles enjoyed it. He liked feeling the cold on his skin, deep inside him. It reminded him that he was still alive, even when he didn’t feel it.

The sound of footsteps behind him stirred him from his thoughts, but he didn’t look back until, “Malia said I might find you here.” His breath caught in his throat and he had to force himself to turn slowly, to pretend that his heart wasn’t about to leap from his chest, before he remembered that it didn’t matter; Derek would hear it anyways.

Stiles hadn’t seen so much as a picture of Derek since he left, only the handwriting that never changed, and he was surprised by how Derek didn’t really look different at all. His hair was a little longer, his face thinner, but his eyes were the same green that they had been when Stiles knew him and… “You were in South America and you kept the leather jacket?”

Derek laughed and that was new. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Derek laugh before. “It was my father’s,” he said, smiling softly. It faltered just a little bit. “You know, I think I’m just a little offended. I kind of expected a little more shock and excitement than this.” He gestured at Stiles, who was still sitting in the dirt, head tilted back to look at him. “Maybe a hug.”

“You’d rip my throat out with your teeth,” Stiles said, but he was starting to smile now too, and he was standing up before he could stop himself and coming closer, letting himself just look at Derek. “You haven’t changed much.”

“You have,” Derek commented, eyes skimming over Stiles’ entire body. A long time ago, that would’ve made Stiles go red. Now he only shivered a little, and he was more willing to blame it on the wind than Derek’s focus on him. He didn’t say anything else though, just gazed at Stiles while he gazed back, until Stiles finally broke the silence again.

“Why’d you come back?”

Derek didn’t hesitate. “I was always going to come home eventually.”

They walked back through the woods together, talking a little, but mostly just quiet, looking over at each other every few minutes. Stiles’ head was reeling with all the feelings he’d suppressed back in high school and then never thought of later, when Derek was gone, because there wasn’t any point. Except now he was here, close enough that his shoulder brushed Stiles’ with every step, and the proximity was making him dizzy. He held onto the feeling, because it was the most real thing he could remember feeling in a long time.

 

Derek trained to be a mechanic and opened up a shop in Beacon Hills, not far from the library. He joined in with the pack like he had always been there, and the gaping hole in Stiles’ chest seemed to close up a little more every time Derek was in the same room. They fell into a routine of bringing each other lunch when they were both on a shift, or visiting each other when they weren’t. The other librarians gave Stiles little smiles when Derek would show up, but he ignored it, like he always had. This was good. Perfect.

The pack helped renovate the Hale house, rebuilding it from the ground up, until it was as magnificent as it had ever been, even with every little difference. Major differences, really. It looked hardly like it had before, but it was home even before Stiles realized it, until one day he was sitting on the couch reading a book on ancient Greek lore and Derek leaned over to press a feather-light kiss to his hair. In the corner of his eye he saw Derek freeze on his way to the kitchen, as if he’d just realized what he had done. His hands clenched at his sides, and then he stalked back towards Stiles and tilted his chin up to kiss him on the mouth. Stiles kissed him easily, and the hole in his chest disappeared almost completely. 

Derek was looking at him with a fond little smile, lightly scratching the back of Stiles’ neck where the hair blended into skin. Stiles kissed him again because he wanted to know how that smile would feel under his lips, and Derek melted into him like he had just realized that it was what he wanted too.

He reflected for a moment that Allison had been right from the beginning and thanked her silently before pulling Derek closer and letting everything else but him fade out.


End file.
